New Delhi, June 15: Their friends get the sharp side of their teacher’s tongue if their hemlines venture above the knees. They live in short skirts and shorts. Their friends spend their waking hours wondering how to stretch that allowance. They earn in dollars. Their friends spend 40-minute school periods mugging details of geography; they travel the world. Their friends consider taking a bus a big adventure; they handle air-tickets, emigration, visa, lost baggage, hotel bookings, sponsorship deals. Alone.
And they play tennis. A couple of them—Sanaa Bhambri, Sania Mirza—well enough to reach the semis of the French Open, to be mentioned in the same breath as Leander-Mahesh, while the others—Ankita Bhambri, Isha Lakhani, Shruti Dhawan, Sonal Phadke, Liza Pereira—wait for their turn on centre court.
It’s tempting, as an increasing number of homegrown girls make their presence felt on the international tennis courts and pose for pretty pictures, to give them the Good-Looking-Girls-in-Short-Skirts (GLGSS) tag, and call them Kournikova clones. But it’s also grossly unfair. Scratch the glamour surface and what emerges are not airheads, but hugely confident young women comfortable with talent and all the baggage that comes with it.

This is quite evident at the off-the-court photo shoot. The GLGSS insisted on changing out of their work attire and into shorts or track pants. The unspoken message: ‘‘Off the courts, this is what we’re comfortable in.’’ In other words: Don’t mess.
She’s 16 going on 17, and tennis can consider itself lucky she chose it over all the other possibilities. ‘‘I belong to a family where sports is a way of life. Pursuing a sport was the normal thing to do and for me it just happened to be tennis,’’ says Sania Mirza, the It Girl of Indian Tennis and world No 13 in juniors.